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Tuesday, December 31, 2013

A Belated Merry Christmas

Well it's a little late to be posting about Christmas decorations considering it's NYE, but at least it's still December, right? I went small scale on the decorations this year since we moved in so recently - it seemed a little mixed up to go crazy for Christmas when we don't have more important stuff in the house yet (like a real dining room table, for instance!).

The front door just got a simple fresh wreath (on my deer wreath hanger!) and fresh garland strung up around it. I also wrapped some faux garland and added a bow to the lamp post by the front walkway, but that was it for the exterior.

I have plans for massive Christmas trees in the family room because of its high ceiling, but this year we decided to get a little guy that we can plant in the yard to commemorate our first Christmas in the house. Some of the trees grew rapidly up to 40-60 feet (eek!), so we decided on this little blue spruce that grows very slowly and never turns into a behemoth. The tree came in a plastic bucket, so I just wrapped some burlap and a ribbon around the base.

The tree was mostly old red and gold glass ornaments.

Our mantle is just a rehash of what we put up in the condo last year, except that now it's actually a mantle and not entertainment center shelving, and I also got these cute gold deer - on sale for $5.99 at Michaels!

With all the bare walls in the house, I decided to string up some ribbon to hang the Christmas cards on one of them. I cut out a 'Merry Christmas' sign on my Silhouette using adhesive vinyl. This was taken a while back when we hadn't received all the cards yet - a third ribbon really would have been useful!

On the kitchen island, I put this old little mini tree.

In the dining room, I hung gold & silver ornaments from the chandelier.

I created this simple centerpiece with white and gold glittery branches and bright red berries in a glass vase. Of course, I forgot to get a picture when the table was actually set up with a tablecloth, so you can see the crease of our fancy plastic folding table in this pic!

The last piece in the dining room was a vase with some fresh pine branches from the yard to the bar cart - although they looked a little more rough than I had hoped!

Unfortunately, we didn't have a white Christmas (that's rare in our area), but we did get an early snow a couple weeks prior. I wish it would've stayed snow covered longer to hide our straw & mud yard!

We hosted Christmas dinner for 15, and it was so nice to be able to fit all those family members comfortably in the house! How was your holiday? Did you do much decorating this year? Have you ever planted a Christmas tree in your yard?